"You open up the doors": Bill Orcutt at the Pearl, with JP Carter and the Battery (and some photos of Emad Armoush a few weeks ago)

Bill Orcutt in blue light, by Allan MacInnis

I realize it's conventional to begin reviews by talking about the headliner. Here's a token line or two, for the impatient: Bill Orcutt is a singularity, a precious, unique, impossible-to-replicate phenomenon in the world of guitar. People might elect to play like Hendrix, to play like Zappa, to play like any of a number of bluesmen of yore. You could at least TRY, you know? You could probably even attempt to play like John Fahey, who seems vastly more relevant: the territory that Fahey staked out was pretty unique to him, and I haven't noticed many incursions into it, but I think one COULD play like Fahey, if one so chose. 

I don't think anyone but Bill Orcutt could play like Bill Orcutt, no matter how much they wanted to. He seems to put his whole being into his playing; there's so much of him in it that unless you are him, you won't be able to do it.  

So those of us in the audience last night were truly privileged. Not that there weren't, also, some issues -- technical ones, and an eccentric, provocative decision to work with them, rather than resolve them, though I guess working with an issue can also be a form of resolution... we'll get there. I want to write about the opening act first. Home team, then the visitors, you know? They were terrific, too. 

As JP Carter and the Battery played, a ghostly live animation doppleganger appeared on the curtain behind them, like a cartoon made out of smoke, shimmering and shifting with their movements. It was a very cool effect, one I had not seen before. I wonder if it is a feature of the lighting at the Pearl, or if the effect, and the tech to make it, travels with the band? 

The two drummers -- including John Brennan of Earthball, or Earth Ball (Jeremy told me how he likes it and I think it's the former but I keep seeing the latter so I dunno) -- laid down this veritable swamp of percussion: I thought first of the racket of frogsong (which would make JP, like, a dragonfly or something, hovering over the pond?) then revised my model to see the two drummers, the other being César Chew, as repping the various pulses and rhythms of the body, every thumping organ, creaking bone, clacking tooth, twitching nerve, as if somehow it was all amplified into pounding audibility, into a thick layer of noise, over, under, and through which the dreaming mind sailed. 

Bodies are actually really noisy things; you just can't usually hear them, if that makes sense. And if the body is an instrument, surely it's a percussive one?

JP was, of course, that dreaming mind, the ghost in the machine, with the coffee-can-muted trumpet, electronics, and (seemingly) effortless circular breathing (when I see people do this, I always expect a point where they stop and gasp for air, or maybe collapse, but it never comes). He was definitely more like a dreaming mind than a dragonfly -- there were no jagged zigzags, for example. I had forgotten to bring the copy of The Wire that I had promised him -- the one time I have been published by that magazine, in a Global Ear, which was for awhile online, but now appears not to be again (the link is just to a sampling of bands that got mentioned, including one of his). I have an extra copy around somewhere -- it transpired when I chatted with him at Emad's avant-garde flamenco show a few weeks ago that he'd never seen it. It was 2008, and we'd talked about 1067 and the Olympics; he was one of several Vancouver artists I interviewed, to create a portrait of a scene nervously eyeing the tide of development and renoviction that was visibly headed our way.

I think I saw Kenton in the audience last night, but I could have been wrong (the guy I thought was Alex Varty turned out, on closer examination, not to be). Darwin was there, though, and Josh (Magneticring Josh, not the other Joshes, who seem to have left town), and Barbara -- a few people I know. Lots of people I don't know, too, and in seats, no less. Tim had laid out seats! That was nice. Who wants to STAND for a jazz gig? I know someone who elected not to come because of the presumed lack of seats at the Pearl. I actually called him before things started to let him know ("Hey, there are seats!") but he'd resigned himself to giving up his ticket and had commenced on the cocktails, so he wasn't going out. Said ticket ended up going to Dave Bowes, who I will heretofore mention as "Dave."

Note to promoters: if you are putting seats in a usually non-seated venue, for a show where this is plainly a good idea, you should mention that far and wide in the promotional materials for the show, because NOT EVERYONE THINKS TO DO THAT. I had to stand for Magma, at the Pearl, back when it was the Venue. It made no fuckin' sense. Last night's seats made sense! 

Anyhow, this all reminds me that I never put photos of Emad's gig at Zameen into the world. Here are a couple! Chatted with Kenton about seeing him with Eugene Chadbourne, at that show; I believe I saw all three times he played with him. Kenton seemed in a very good mood that night! 

But to return to the Orcutt gig: through JP Carter and the Battery's set, until Bill Orcutt took the stage, Bill and Tim Reinert were up at the front of the house, hanging out at the merch table, where Bill was signing whatever people asked. A few people were borrowing a Sharpie I'd brought, so I just donated it to the cause. He seemed very chill, affable even, and in no rush to play, enjoying hanging out in Vancouver for the first time in 30 years (as Tim had told me in the Straight thing I did). I wonder what he and Tim talked about?

Bill seemed a softer, gentler, nicer man than I'd imagined from his music or photographs, where he seemed a lot more daunting and intense. He was very pleasant in my interactions with him, but I didn't want to stick a mic in his face, you know? I do want to talk to him about September, when he returns to Vancouver, but it seems unreasonable to corral people at the merch table. Performance-mind is not interview-mind. But I got a few records with his input. I told him I found Harry Pussy terrifying and he recommended I get the one with Chris Corsano, chuckling that people had described it as "unexpectedly musical." They also had the one I have most fallen in love with, How to Rescue Things. And Bill recommended Odds Against Tomorrow (named for a striking noir starring Harry Belafonte and Robert Ryan, involving a black jazzman, if I recall correctly, who ends up part of a heist with a racist partner). 

I was happy to see Nathan Holiday buying a record. Hey, Tim, Nathan is this guy. 

Later, Tim would tell us that Bill had brought enough records for three dates  -- there were six stacks on the merch table at the start of the gig -- and ended up selling them all (did Tim say, "Sorry, Winnipeg" or "Suck it, Winnipeg"? I forget!). Pro tip: if you are jonesing for having missed out on Orcutt vinyl, there's a bunch of them on sale at Audiopile. But he won't have signed them. 

Is Audiopile the only record store in Vancouver that actually has an avant-garde section? They might be. I wonder if that's from Jeremy having worked there. (He was at the Orcutt show last night, too, btw). They had about a dozen of his titles the other day. Maybe they're all sold out now, too?

I milled about, waiting for Dave, who arrived about 9:15, just before Orcutt shambled onto the stage. "Shambled" feels appropriate; everything about this man seemed soft-edged, except for his playing. Which wasn't hard-edged -- it's not like if you're not one thing, you're the opposite -- but which was definitely not soft. Soulful, to be sure, but in a pass-the-strychnine, praise-the-Lord kind of way....

 

Orcutt wasted no time getting into it, once he began to play -- and really, listening now to the opening track from Odds Against Tomorrow, it could have been that very piece he was doing. Very soon after he began, he was rocking back and forth in his chair and yelping along with his playing, as his fingers flew up and down the neck, his occasional vocal parts seeming a mix of irrepressible Glenn-Gould trance-hum, serpent-tent glossolalia, and a smokin' bluesman's shouts.

There was definitely blues in what he did, though it wasn't THE blues. Less blues than Loren Mazzacane Connors, say... another singularity (could someone bring HIM to town next?). But more blues than Keiji Haino, for instance. I must also here confess that I thought of that soaring, impressionistic guitar solo Jerry Garcia recorded for Zabriskie Point's central "scorched hippie desert lovemaking scene," that only happened because John Fahey got in fisticuffs with Antonioni and lost the gig; except Orcutt doesn't play very much like Jerry Garcia -- "hippie romanticism" may have been an  ingredient somewhere in the mix of influences, but it was definitely not a predominant one; I suspect the comparison would invite derision from certain parties. Me, I love Zabriskie Point, even have the expanded soundtrack, but that's a digression. 

 

Anyhow, very early on, a barrier emerged between where we were, artist and audience alike, and where Orcutt wanted to take us, because the amp that was set up started to fritz out, replacing passages with unwanted, buzzing noise, like someone had thrown a blanket of steel wool over the stage; you could only barely hear the music under it. Someone tell that amp that it's not in the band?

At first, Orcutt just tried to play past it -- like he was refusing to let it interfere with the trance he was entering, or something. I do confess wondering a couple of times if it was a deliberate effect -- but you could eventually see him glance over in irritation at times, which was a definite signifier that the noise was not intentional. He cut short his first piece, then hit a switch on his simple pedal setup (Dave Bowes, actually a musician, could explain what this was but duhh, I'm a dummy that way) and the noise seemed to stop, but so did much of the amplification, so he quickly turned it back on. Finally he just stopped the second piece and said from the stage, "Is there another amplifier available? I mean, it does sound interesting in a fucked up way, and I can play with it, but..." He chuckled. 

A tech came up and started connecting another amp, but then a curious thing happened: people in the audience started shouting that it sounded great, shouting their encouragements to continue. Maybe they were fans of the sounds of malfunctioning equipment? (Y'all know this HardTimes piece, right? "Emerging Harsh Noise Artist Revealed To Be Faulty Air Conditioning Unit"...?). Or maybe this was just a Polite Vancouver thing, reassuring the artist that we were not upset?  

If so, I would like to have a word with Polite Vancouver, briefly: I'd really rather have heard what Bill intended to play for us WITHOUT the unexpected contributions of a blown-out amp. He didn't need reassurance: he needed a new amp! And we mighta got one if y'all hadn't been so quick to tell him it was all okay.  

But while the tech teched, a shrugging Orcutt began a third piece, involving denser, more mathematical clusters of notes, more cerebral, that I think may have been partially about testing the scope of what the malfunctioning amp COULD still do, like he was learning what sounds it would make, treating it like a fellow player he was jamming with for the first time, getting to know its quirks. Whether he had arrived at happy medium or wanted to please the "sounds great" Politefolks, when the tech approached after piece #3 to say that he was ready to switch amps, Orcutt  just elected to work with the one he had going. 

Whatever exactly was going on up there, whyever Orcutt actually chose to keep working with the grievous equipment, from that point on, for the rest of the night, everything sounded totally deliberate. Orcutt had -- I guess -- learned the ways of his new "accompanist" and just plunged back into his trancelike, virtuosic, glossolalic blues-improv, having found his way to make it work "in spite of." I shot about six minutes of it, including some of those yelps. It all sounds intentional to me -- distorted, maybe, despite the lack of a distortion pedal -- but none of it, after the first couple pieces, sounded wrong. 

Dave and I chatted afterwards, about how curious it all ways. "I guess he just chose to work with the limitation?" Dave observed. "I mean, it's like a haiku or a sonnet, people choose to work with those limitations. What a curious thing..." 

Later, when taking the stage for his encore, Orcutt quipped, "I haven't quite finished destroying this amp yet..."  

Two things happened of note before that. One you can see at the tail end of my video: Orcutt reached a fever of playing and vocalization that culminated in his shouting "February second! February second!" twice, at which point, his guitar completely cut out. I was sitting close enough that I could still hear his strumming, but the recorder didn't pick it up at all. Later on, when it was all over and he came back to the stage to get his gear, I asked him what February 2nd was.

"My birthday!" Bill replied. 

"Was that also a cue for these guys to join you onstage?" (JP Carter and the Battery joined Bill for a single piece, immediately following, which is the second thing of note that happened). 

"No, it's stupid, I don't know why I did it, it just happened. You know, you open up the doors..." 

"Holy shit!" I said, laughing, and then I asked if he minded if I put the clip into the world, and he asked me what I meant, and I said "On Youtube" and he said he did not care, so there you go... that's a taste of what we saw last night. Do you not feel like scrolling up? It's here. 

The set with the Battery was also very cool, but I didn't enjoy it as much as I'm going to enjoy Odds Against Tomorrow and How to Rescue Things, I think. Thanks to Tim Reinert for having put on this magnificent, fascinating, and, as I say, singular show. See you all in September at the Rickshaw, when Orcutt returns? 

I mean, don't miss it, folks. There are still tickets, but it's gonna sell out, I think, even if I don't do press. 

I'm going to do more press nonetheless. And Steve says he'll talk Crucifucks. I'm curious indeed!